


Until the Curtain Call

by cakeisatruth



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Destroy Ending, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Introspection, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2018-02-25
Packaged: 2019-03-23 17:02:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13792173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cakeisatruth/pseuds/cakeisatruth
Summary: “It would be easy for a single ship to get lost up there, wouldn’t it?”In the aftermath of the Crucible explosion, Liara finds herself calculating just how easy such a thing would be.





	Until the Curtain Call

**Author's Note:**

> Started this one ages ago, inspired by a friend. (Before anyone asks - no, we weren’t romantically involved. Fic has a way of running away with you.)
> 
> Enjoy.

She’d thought about it before, of course. The idea had first started occurring to Liara decades ago, less than a year after she’d learned to drive: how easy it would be to ignore her usual sign for the highway off-ramp and just _keep going_ until she passed everything she was familiar with. She could get lost out there, start over, make a new life for herself. A life where no one knew Liara T’Soni, daughter of a Matriarch, archaeologist.

Then those thoughts would disappear, and she’d come back to her right mind - remembering all the logistics and consequences that would arise from such a thing - and turn off the highway towards home. And yet somehow, she couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that felt like a moral to some story: how little it would take to change everything. How quickly the galaxy, and her life, could be turned around - for better or for worse.

She could never seem to stop the counting, or the endless lists inside her mind. They appeared now anytime she had more than a minute or so to think, and then she’d be off down the rabbit hole.

From meeting Shepard to being welcomed on-board the _Normandy_ SR-1: less than ninety minutes.

From the first sign of trouble to the ship going down in flames and Shepard being tossed out into space: fifty-four minutes by the ship’s log.

From beginning her search for Feron to taking control of the Shadow Broker’s systems: two and a half hours.

There had been changes that took longer and proceeded more gradually, of course. Her degree, the fight against Saren, researching the Protheans, returning to the new and improved _Normandy_. The two years between losing Shepard and seeing her again, changed but alive. And there had been smaller things around Shepard, too - the first meld, the first kiss, the first touch. The laughter, the joy, the wonder, the love.

Confessing, as they lay on Shepard’s bed with their legs still intertwined, how she had dreamed of being on a single ship in the galaxy that got lost up there. And her bondmate had smiled, rubbed a thumb over Liara’s cheek affectionately, and said little. There was no getting lost, and both of them knew it. This was arguably the most important crew of the entire Alliance fleet, and it was until it wasn’t. Because it had taken under eleven hours for that to change, too.

From the bright red flashes that took down the ship and sent EDI permanently offline, to the commander being recovered: three hours. Three hours’ worth of frantic, whispered prayers - _please, Goddess, let her be all right_ and _Shepard, Shepard, just hold on until they find you_ \- three hours to recover the woman who had saved them all, badly wounded and scarcely breathing but _alive_ , damn it.

From finding her to finding the place that would treat her, and getting there: half an hour.

There was little left, so little of the technology that was desperately needed to get her where she had to be and to fix her body, but they would make it work, they had to. Shepard had survived the Crucible. She’d _won_.

The doctors worked on her for seven hours. She’d been in critical condition all that time. Getting a reliable comm link took almost as long, but in the end, the severely damaged tech was no match for a crew and Shadow Broker desperate for information. Seven hours under the knife, and at last they received the news Commander Shepard had died on the operating table, when the last thread that kept her hanging on to life finally snapped.

Liara’s immediate reaction had been to sob. What else could she do? Nothing, except break down where she stood in the middle of the bridge - and then there had been murmurs and shouts of realization and disbelief, mixed with comforting arms around her and hands on her back and shoulders, because this meant only one thing and _it could not possibly be real_.

Strange, that, how the heart could be broken over something the brain did not believe. And strange how it could take less than eleven hours to change everything forever.

The orders came in hot on the heels of this news, all logic and no emotion. They set course for the Citadel, where the Alliance officers would be welcomed and placed until they were reassigned. Once there, the _Normandy_ was to be turned over, back into Alliance custody for repairs and, likely, display. A proper rest. Nobody pretended this was anything but its final trip.

All non-Alliance members were already free to go, with a single stipulation: anything left behind would become military property. Tali, never much for material possessions, had left just two days after Shepard’s wake. You didn’t have to be the Shadow Broker to know she was going back to Rannoch in search of a home (a long journey, with all the damage done to the relays, but not impossible by any means). A glimpse of her in the shuttle on her way out showed she’d taken a single bag, small enough to fit on her lap.

How easy it must be to _just go_ , Liara found herself thinking. And at the same time, it wasn’t anywhere near that easy.

For one thing - probably the most obvious - there was the matter of her office. Its most essential hardware and backups had been adequately protected from the start, and most bore only scuffs and dings as evidence of the crash-landing, but other pieces weren’t so lucky. There was no way to do it quickly, either. It was just the slow, tedious process of sorting through every bit of equipment, determining its functionality, and trying not to think of Shepard the whole time. Some days it was impossible to forget she was gone, the thought almost omnipresent, and other days she could almost put it out of her mind until the smallest thing brought it back - sometimes as simple as deciding an object was beyond all repair, then thinking Shepard would have referred to that as “FUBAR.”

 _How many days was it to Rannoch, Tali?_ Liara wanted to ask, but couldn’t. The Shadow Broker had no reason to ask those kind of questions, truthfully; the answer was at her fingertips. But the real question was one that had no answer, or maybe too many of them: _How much time does it take to start over?_

Among the things that had gone offline was Glyph, broken in three pieces scattered so far apart in the cabin that it was six days before she found them all. The repair work itself took less than two days - admittedly, long ones, but soon the little drone was humming around her office and she wondered at how quiet it had been before. At how quiet it still was, with no one to turn to and say, _Tell me what you think of this_ , or, _Do you think Glyph really sounds any different now?_ But there was the computerized voice calling for, “Doctor T’Soni!” at all hours of the day, and that inched things the slightest bit closer towards bearable.

Garrus left a week later out of necessity. He’d been trying to get his records with the turian military back in order (Liara having been the one to bring up how they’d mistakenly classified him as “missing in action”), and things would move faster with him physically present there. Though she said nothing, it was easy to detect his relief, the feeling of leaving an environment that had once been so much and then changed so quickly. There were emotions in the air here, always had been, and you couldn’t walk through the ship without feeling them. During the war, it had been a shout, a rallying cry, an air of support, and - to Liara - love. Now it was the feeling of, as humans said, going out with a whimper.

Shepard would never have stood for this, but she'd been beyond done fighting by the end. She never admitted as much, not even during their late-night chats alone in her cabin, but no one would deny the commander had been beyond due for a break. Before the Crucible explosion, they’d meant vacation; now, somehow those same words meant _this_.

Seven hours on the operating table. Eleven hours between the shot that killed the Reapers and Shepard’s death, all that time that had kept her from the rest she needed.

That was all they said, wasn’t it? How much better it was that she got the eternal rest she needed, no, deserved. But it was impossible not to feel selfish. Thirty years old, not counting the time she’d already spent dead. Even by human standards, she’d deserved better. And if they weren’t measuring by normal human standards…who knew how long the cybernetic parts of her body could have kept her alive, if not for everything the war took from them?

She’d beaten the Crucible explosion, and died anyway, aged thirty. Before this, there had only been two possible outcomes in Liara’s mind: either Shepard would survive the explosion and be all right, or she would die trying to end it all. In reality, they had gotten neither of those.

The Goddess must be laughing at her now.

It felt, sometimes, as if life were now _designed_ around reminders that Shepard was no longer here. Liara would awaken slumped over in her chair in the middle of the night, neck stiff and back aching, because no one was there to nudge her towards bed when it became hard to keep her eyes open. An old photo or a note full of typos she’d written in better times would flit across her datapad screen. Alliance-related information would need to be delivered not to Shepard, but to XO Williams.

Even her own smashed monitors were somehow enough to remind Liara of what had happened. And in the rare moments where there was no tangible reminder around to be seen, she could hear it like a mantra repeating in her brain, refusing to be silenced: her bondmate was dead, dead, dead.

She made the venture up to the captain’s cabin the next morning, hoping to clean up what little she could. In the end she’d simply stood at the door for a moment, looking at the walls and floors inside, before leaving the way she came. _Another day_.

They’d put the ship in a museum somewhere. Maybe that was where it belonged. A place no one would be pulling helmets and old dogtags - the same ones she’d recovered for Shepard a year ago - out of rubble, broken glass, and dead fish. A place that turned this heavy atmosphere into something crisp and clinical and educational, something fascinating for the children to look at. And if Liara never returned to see it, that could be all right too. Maybe she would, and maybe she wouldn’t.

Three weeks until they reached the Citadel, with the captain’s cabin still a disaster, because starting over was so very much effort. Liara’s office, for its part, had slowly become more packed than not. Boxes sat in a muddled array on the floor, forming a zigzagged walkway that led to more than one bruised shin when she climbed out of bed groggily in the middle of the night. No one had to know this was how the Shadow Broker lived.

Two weeks out. Javik disappeared. She would find him again one day and say hello, but today wasn’t that day. Today was day three of having half the office in boxes, sitting. Waiting. She’d gotten down to her most vital equipment, Glyph, and the mementos she both never wanted to look at again and wanted to hold close every moment of every day.

Oh, asari were _meant_ to outlive humans and most other species. That much was common knowledge. Oh, they should enjoy their time together for what it was, and not go on doing a silly thing like _mourning_. And yet nothing could describe with words how it felt to turn around, ready to show Shepard the newest discovery she had made, only for realization to hit a split second later and steal the air from her lungs.

T minus ten days, and the base had been secured, awaiting shipments of the supplies that weren’t time-sensitive. Whether she would follow them - that was another matter.

If it wasn’t possible for the Shadow Broker to disappear, it wouldn’t be possible for anyone. But were disappearing and getting lost the same things? Another question entirely.

Six days left. One self-driving shuttle loaded with her things, another empty so she could ride in peace. As Liara stood double-checking her lists, she heard the footsteps behind her long before she turned around.

“So…you’re really leaving.”

She twisted her neck around, datapad in hand. “Yes, Miss Williams.”

“I was kinda wondering if you’d stay with us longer.” She didn’t sound upset, just thoughtful. “The Alliance is gonna split us all up when we get in.”

Liara said nothing, but turned to face her fully.

“My contract’s up in a few weeks, you know.” Ashley looked at her, and Liara nodded. “Anyway - hope this won’t be the last we see of you. Let me know when you get where you’re going, yeah?”

“Yes. I do not know how long I will be. Most likely at least a few days.” Practically speaking, in terms of travel, it wasn’t much time at all. And still, sometimes it felt like forever, when one remembered how quickly everything could change.

A long breath in, and then Ashley patted her shoulder. “Drive safe, all right?”

“I will. Thank you.” In her peripheral vision, the datapad went into sleep mode, but she didn’t turn it back on. “And…good luck, for where you go next.”

“You too.”

Liara slid into the driver’s seat, shutting the door behind her. Without conscious thought, her gaze went to the preloaded maps, the far beyond. _How easy it would be to get lost up there._

But that was for another day. Today would be eleven hours, and then a stop, and some more if she wasn’t there yet. She’d determine where _there_ was, in her own time. Liara turned the key, and felt the engine rev, the floor vibrating steadily beneath her feet.

**Author's Note:**

> For Silvvy, who beat leukemia.
> 
> 6/4/1996 - 7/25/2015
> 
> Everything changed in just 52 days.


End file.
